There are many situations, such as live broadcast production or distribution, where an operator or host wishes to start and stop the transmission of flows (e.g., audio data, video data, metadata, media content, and/or the like) with as little latency as possible. Current Internet Protocol (IP) based systems, however, cannot support industry standards for latency in live broadcast production due to the host-driven nature of the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for multicast IP flows. The current response time to IGMP join and leave requests is dependent on multiple factors such as hardware programming time, the number of layers in the network or the number of switches to be programmed, and the total number of flows in the system. Moreover, IGMP does not have provide a security mechanism on behalf of either the flow sender or the flow receiver. As such, anyone in the system is able to initiate a flow, which potentially leads to oversubscription in the network and impacts the media production. Similarly, any device in an IP system is able to submit an IGMP join request to start receiving these flows, which potentially enables malicious devices to disrupt the system or steal unauthorized media content.
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